The poetry as I see it haiku

Poetry's job is
not to regurgitate pop-
ular platitudes.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2015)

Notes
If poetry has a job (some might argue that it is too sacrosanct to have something so mundane, while others might say that it is permanently jobless), then it should be more meaningful than to replicate favorite platitudes and attitudes and well-trodden ways of seeing, thinking and feeling. In an age where taste seems to be dictated by the number of likes or little hearts something gets, this is all the more important to keep in mind ... lest poetry completely descend to the democracy of insipidity.

The GMP haiku

You can’t just write it
from scratch. First buy patented
seeds from Monsanto.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2015)

Notes
GMP stands for Genetically Modified Poetry.

The John Singer Sargent haiku

John Singer Sargent, White Dresses (1911)

Two women slain in
battle? No – white dresses in
peace on parched grass...

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2014)

Note
When I first glimpsed this painting, my initial flash was that it represented an after-battle scene – bodies strewn on the ground, limbs sticking up.
The first real haiku I've written in a while ... with that sudden flash of recognition in the second half.

The how to haiku

(a DIY poem)

Fourteen lessons a-
bout haiku: that ought to teach
even the toughest.

– Leonard “Haikai” Blumfeld (© 2011)

Chanced upon a site today that offers to teach you how to write haiku in 14 lessons (Bare Bones School of Haiku).
Skipped all 14 but wrote something I'd call a haiku, even though I'm sure it breaks at least 17 major plus some minor haiku rules.

Vortic exercise

I’d
like
to hurl
myself in a
swirl – hurtling into
synesthesia: sound, meaning, love.

– Leonard “Vorticist for a Change” Blumfeld

Notes
A fibonacci written for Swirl at Inspire Me Thursday.
Alludes to the vorticist art movement (and Ezra Pound, who coined the term) – without, I admit, knowing much about it beyond surface stuff.

Experiment involving ladies, leopards and a juniper tree

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree in the cool of the day
– T. S. Eliot

And now four Blumfeld variations, to be accompanied by lute and shawm:

Leopard: three white ladies sat under a juniper tree in the cool of the day
Juniper: three white days sat under a leopard tree in the cool of the ladies
Cool tree: three juniper trees sat under a leopard in the white of the day
Cool ladies: a juniper tree sat under the leopard in three whites of the day

Posted in honor of Sunday Scribblings #101 - The Experiment as an experiment in/with/on modernist poetry.

T. S. Eliot, when asked the meaning of the line 'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree in the cool of the day...' from Ash Wednesday (1927), said "It means 'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree in the cool of the day...'".

Questions as to the meaning of the Blumfeld variations are welcome.

Photo courtesy of Snow Leopard Trust, an organization that has been helping to save the Asian snow leopard for 25 years.

Ode to loneliness

This
is an ode
to
loneliness

It has
neither
an anode

nor, you
guessed it,
a cathode

– Leonard Blumfeld (copyright 2007)

Invitable note
Written in an attack of musing about loneliness and its pain and omnipresence even in the presence of others, and using or mis/abusing the 3-part form of the ode (strophe, antistrophe and epode), see Wikipedia.

Invitable afternote
This "ode" could be simply read as a joke, but it might possibly invite further speculation along the lines of what should preferably happen between anode and cathode and what the result is if nothing happens or if these two movers are removed. Enough said!

Warmed-up fib

Al-
read-
y em-
broiled in it
all: life, digestion,
dark, light, movement, emotion, fate

– Leonard Blumfeld (copyright 2007)

Legal alert
It might be illegal to hyphenate a word to make the right number of syllables. But then again who's going to sue me?

Weather continues

The grayness today is such
that it could be said
that a consonant
has been added

If I were a certain creative character out there, I would now claim to have originated a new poetic form.

Maybe I have. It could be called the non-rhyming weather quatrain, for example, abbreviated NRWQ.

By the way: One of the main rules of the NRWQ is that the 2nd and 3rd lines have to start with that.